A third figure follows them leisurely along the terrace. It is that of another old woman, small and round, with a kind red face and quick eyes: she is, one may guess, of an amiable and talkative disposition.
They walk across the terrace through the hotel doorway, looking like people out of a picture of Hogarth's--sad, ugly, grotesque, unlike anything else under the sun. Everything seems to grow dark and dim in their presence.
They are Dutch people, brother and sister, the children of a diamond merchant and banker. Their life has been full of strange events if one may believe what is lightly said of them.
As a child, the hunchback was quiet, self-contained, always musing, and not fond of toys. This attracted no special attention from anybody except his sister. His father and mother thought that was how a deformed boy should be; but in the girl, who was four years older than her brother, his character aroused a feeling of anxiety.
Almost every day she was with him, trying in all possible ways to awaken in him some animation. To make him laugh she would push toys towards him. He piled them one on top of another, building a sort of pyramid. Only very rarely did he reward her efforts with a forced smile; as a rule he looked at his sister, as at everything else, with a forlorn look in his large eyes which seemed to suffer from some strange kind of blindness. This look chilled her ardour and irritated her.
"Don't dare to look at me like that! You will grow up an idiot!" she shouted, stamping her foot. And she would pinch him and beat him. He whimpered and put up his long arms to guard his head, but he never ran away from her and never complained.
Later on, when she thought that he could understand what had become quite clear to her she kept saying to him:
"Since you are a freak, you must be clever, or else everybody will be ashamed of you, father, mother, and everybody! Even other people will be ashamed that in such a rich house there should be a freak. In a rich house everything must be beautiful and clever. Do you understand that?"
"Yes," said he, in his serious way, inclining his large head towards one side and looking into her face with his dark, lifeless _eyes._
His father and mother were pleased with this attitude of their daughter towards her brother. They praised her good heart in his presence and by degrees she became the acknowledged guardian of the hunchback. She taught him to play with toys, helped him to prepare his lessons, read him stories about princes and fairies.